There was an excellent article on how to enable Multimedia on a Slackware Linux system in a blog called Human Readable, that was deleted, well whatever the case its been made no longer available, it did have a lot of outdated stuff but for the most part was a good guide, it just now mentions for everyone to have a look at the slack docs, which for me still lacks in at least defining which are the most useful packages and codecs people should install to enable most any common multimedia use (from listening to plain old .mp3 to playback of DVD encrypted or otherwise, other options etc.) on your Slackware System, aside from typical power programs like VLC or Mplayer and Xine, I mean I mention them here too, but just in case you want to use other apps and options than these you need other certain things too, to install.

The Short of it would be to install flashplayer-plugin, vlc and maybe a java JRE whether oracle or openjdk for those java apps and web plugin (you can find flash, vlc and opendjk in slackbuilds.org for oracle you have to go to oracle website and download it from there due to license issues). The VLC package itself has many dependencies you need to compile and install to be able to run VLC for a detailed look of the packages continue reading below.

Here I list the programs/packages you need to install, you can choose which combos you'd like to install for your multimedia choices, I tried to order a few combos

- Make sure to read the info of anything you install upstream or slackbuilds, it will help you configure and compile
- All files available from slackbuilds, binaries can be found in various repos, a notable mention for alien bob's restricted repos for vlc and ffmpeg
- Make sure to run slackbuild of ffmpeg in a real root shell ("su -")
- texlive is a huge 1.3G+ download and build, make sure you have space and a big /tmp
- gst-plugins-good and openssl are part of Slackware default stock install, make sure you install them, as they can be useful, especially if you want to enlable
openssl in FFMPEG build by passing variable build option in the slackbuild of FFMPEG
- mplayer and kplayer, along with xine and xmms are also part of a default slackware stock install, make sure you install them if you dont do a full stock vanilla
install
- When using ffado as a normal user you might run into permission problems with access to /dev/raw1394. To solve that issue you can add the line
KERNEL=="raw1394", GROUP="disk" to /lib/udev/rules.d/65-permissions.rules and make your user is/are a member of the disk group.
- Jack-audio-connection-kit when started as normal user, must be with the following command:

$ sudo setcap cap_ipc_lock,cap_sys_nice=ep /usr/bin/jackd

- In installing transcode, do so right after mjpegtools, except you'd have to run either x86/32 or a multilib slackware as its only for i486
- Lua mentioned here is at version 5.1 not 5.2
- Java apps run on jre, alot of apps and if you do development need jdk, jdk includes jre, but a jre package doesnt include jdk, my recommendation is to install jdk

3. Format the drive using the following commands, depending on which filesystem you want I list ext3, ext4 or FAT32:

A1.) Format to FAT32

$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb

/or

B.) Format to EXT3:

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 -n 'Label' -I /dev/sdb

/or

C.) Format to EXT4:

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 -n 'Label' -I /dev/sdb

C2.) Force Format to EXT4 if for some reason the first doesnt work nor the gparted or other partition applications don't work:

$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb

/or

A2.) Alternatively you can create a FAT32 filesystem with the:

$ sudo mkdosfs -n 'Label' -I -F 32 /dev/sdb

*NOTES:

- Where Label will be the name displayed for the USB media so you can set it to whatever you want; and sd(x) is your usb drive you had to remember at step 1, in this case its sdb for my example
- Sometime you need to blow away or purge the contents of a drive before you can properly format it:

*NOTES:
- Where input is the source file and output the outcome file.
- The $ sign at the start of the command is to signify the terminal's prompt, no need to type this in.
- Many file formats are supported, for more see $ man ffmpeg

*NOTES:
- Where input is the source file and output the outcome file.
- The $ sign at the start of the command is to signify the terminal's prompt, no need to type this in.
- Many file formats are supported, for more see $ man ffmpeg

*NOTES:
- Where input(n).mp4 is the input mp4 files you want to join together, you must start from left to right, left starts the order going to the right what follows in order, it is not limited to 3 files, I limit it to 3 only for example purposes.
- The command is written exactly as it starts with command MP4Box and not mp4box or MP4BOX and etc, if you have an error check your case and spelling.
- The $ sign at the start of the command is to signify the terminal's prompt, no need to type this in.
- The # sign at the start of the command is to signify the root terminal's prompt, no need to type this in.

Quick Way to Create a .GIF Animated Picture in Linux from a Video File:

Prerequisite/s:

Be able to use Terminal
Install FFMPEG
Install ImageMagick

Using FFMPEG, we shall extract pictures from a desired video clip, to use for creating the .GIF animated
picture file

$ ffmpeg -i inputfile.avi -r 1 -s sqcif -f image2 image-%3d.jpg

You can also define the image size of the extracted images using the -s flag. The default option is to use the image size same as the video resolution. you can use different video formats just change the file name/extension of the video input in this example we use a .avi video file.

sqcif option stands for the frame size. You can use other options to change sizes: